Sunday, 25 June 2017

Riding the Dufferin Highlands & Beating Up a 360 Camera

A colleague's retirement party at the far end of our school board meant an excuse to ride over an hour each way to the Dufferin County Museum, scenically perched atop the highest point in Southern Ontario. It also happens to be within ten minutes of two of my favourite semi-local rides (there is nothing closer with any twisties).I rode over to Orangeville and then down Hockley Valley Road. We're getting over a flood, and the Hockley River was eating its own banks where ever I saw it. The ride up Airport Road into the highlands was very green and equally floody. The retirement party was unique in that more than 50% of the speeches weren't tedious and so filled with inside jokes that only the speaker thinks them funny - with a few exceptions I wasn't bored with the speeches, which never happens.I didn't take any photos on the way out, but I met my wife at the party and then we thought we might go over to the Terra Nova Public House for dinner, but they had nearly an hour wait on a Friday Night, so we aimed elsewhere. The Mono Cliff's Inn was both immediately welcoming and only ten minutes away over the glacial moraines of the Niagara Escarpment.This time I kept the Ricoh Theta handy and took photos as we went into the setting sun:

After a great appetizer smorgasbord in the unique atmosphere of the bar downstairs at the MCI we headed home in the twilight. I wasn't expecting much out of the Theta camera in the dying light, but as it has before, it exceeded my expectations:

By this point the light is all but gone and I'm beating up on the Theta. A fixed lens fully automatic camera, 360° or not, struggles to manage low light, so this isn't where the Theta was designed to work, but it still does a credible job. It's all but dark out when I take the last photo while travelling under the power lines. I had to beat it up in photoshop a bit to restore some sharpness, but sometimes going with the blur gives you a painted feel to a photo which can give it an abstract vibe. Photography doesn't have to be all about focus.

You can do quite a lot with the desktop software that comes with the Theta,but there are some special formatting options in the online version that are cool. The Tiny Planet view in the online viewer is probably my favourite. The embedded image at the bottom lets you see the whole photo in the raw.

The original

Some Photoshop on the original

Alternative photoshop a bit closer to the natural light

This is the original image in the online software. If you click on the mirror ball icon and then tiny planet you'll see where I got the still images above.

About Tim

An art student who became a millwright and computer technician before going back to school for English & philosophy degrees. Now a computer technology teacher, media maker and avid motorbike rider. Always looking for a more perfect union between man and machine.